March 2015

I this counts as a milestone – Maile has introduced us (or at least me) to the first trendy thing that I had no idea existed until she discovered it. A couple weeks ago, YouTube released a app for kids that contains kid-friendly videos. Maile has been watching lots of videos about drawing and play-do creations – but one of her favorites is watching kids from Japan open these mini-Japanese cooking sets and watching them make them. It’s kind of like an easy bake oven-type thing.

(Dad note: incredibly there is not a wikipedia entry for this yet. We’re really cutting edge here. Maybe Maile and I will write one. This was the best site I could find with some details.)

She devours these videos. Here’s what one looks like:

(That video has been watched more than 16M times!!!)

Seriously – she would watch that all day long if we let her. (And she could – there are 202,000 on Youtube!!!) Luckily, we live right near Japantown so we went down and picked up a kit to try ourselves.

Maile Girl digging in to her poppin' cookin' set...

Here’s Maile getting some practice in making her own “popin’ cookin'” video:

(Dad note: when I went to post this tonight, I saw that this post is my 1,500th since I started the blog ~5.5 years ago. Wow. I’ll need to reflect on that sometime soon – in the meantime, thank you for following along 🙂

As you know we do a lot of dancing in our house. Lauren is always a willing participant, but she often follows the lead of her older sister. Recently, she’s begun working on her own set of moves – no doubt we have many a dance off in our near future. This weekend, she was all about perfecting her “spin move” – as Mommy related to me, this is very serious business. In fact, Lauren did not want any videoing of this going on (yes, we’ve reached the “no pictures” phase with Lauren…)

(Dad note: be sure to watch the final video in this post. You won’t be disappointed.)

We’ve been exploring more and more of the city on the weekends. On Sunday, Mommy led us on a fun excursion to the Seward Slides mini-park over in the Castro. The slides are these two long (and steep) concrete slides that you can ride down on pieces of cardboard.

All smiles ... at the bottom of the slide.

Facing the slides, ready to conquer!

The steps were steep - that's where a helpful big sister comes in...

Can you spot Maile Girl at the tippy top of the slide?

Mommy took this great shot of the three of us at the top of the slide...

Mommy and Lauren get ready to go...

So those were some shots getting to the top… how did it go going down the slide? Well…

Maile Girl started strong and then had second thoughts…

So Daddy agreed to go down with her the first time. Which was a good idea. Sort of. Daddy forgot that his younger daughter is slightly more adventurous than her big sister. So then this happened…

Our normal nanny, Kelly, was off last week, so we had one of our regular babysitters, Brooke, watch Lauren and Elena all week. Brooke is all a professional photographer so we received an excellent set of photos of Lauren and Elena living it up all week. Definitely captures life as a two year old. Looks pretty good if you ask me!

March Madness is always an exciting time around here (well, a very busy time in which I am eternally grateful for Christine picking up the extra slack while I spend some extra time on Team Rankings). We sat down tonight and set to work on our brackets. Figured we’d post this in plenty of time in case anyone wants to use Maile and Lauren’s picks.

Lauren hard at work on her bracket...

Maile and Daddy talking strategy for the Midwest region...

Maile is very proud of her bracket - go Duke!

And, of course, Lauren with her bracket too!

Maile’s completed bracket is … interesting. She’s big on the 15 over 2 upsets, taking New Mexico St, Texas Southern and Belmont all to advance. She also is knocking off #1 seeds Villanova and Wisconsin in round 1. In fairness, Wisconsin is playing Coastal Carolina and as soon as she heard “Carolina”, Maile wanted to pay homage to where Mommy and Daddy met. In better news – Maile also remembered how important Duke is to our family and gave us a little smile as she advanced them each round. She has Duke winning the whole thing!

Maile's complete bracket in case you want to steal some of her picks...

I’ve been interpreting Maile and Lauren’s brackets for years now and have gotten quite good at their pre-writing scribbles and lines. In looking at Lauren’s bracket, here are the highlights:

– She has Kentucky winning it all (seriously there is a line from Kentucky all the way to the middle!)
– She has #5 seed Arkansas going to the Final Four in the West Region
– She has #11 seed UCLA going to the Final Four in the South Region
– And she has Villanova going to the Final Four in the East Region
– She also likes #6 Xavier, #7 Wichita St, #5 W Virgnia and #10 Indiana to win a few games.

Everyone knows that Lauren is a little sister to Maile. But did you know she is also a Mommy? That’s right – Lauren is very into being a Mommy to her dolls, or in her words, “babies”. We have “baby #1”, “baby #2” and “more baby” – and Lauren loves playing with them.

(Dad note: this is a bit different for us as Maile never really was super into dolls.)

Our nanny, Kelly, has been sending us pictures of Lauren interacting with her dolls and they are adorable (see for yourself below). I think Kelly sees a bit more of it because when we are around, Maile often is too, and she dominates a lot of the “play”.

Reading books to one of our babies...

Making sure baby is nice and tucked in...

Cuddling and talking to baby...

That's Lauren's seat she sits in when she is being naugty - maybe baby was naughty too?

We had a fun visit this weekend from a couple of my really good friends from college that I’ve known since freshman year. They live down in Dallas now with their three kids and came out to visit us (and our other friends) here in San Francisco. On Sunday morning we got together for some hiking and fun at the Presidio Picnic.

Weather was fantastic and the hike was a really nice way to start the day. Looking forward to doing more of that, especially as Lauren gets a bit older. (She really did a great job though keeping up and having fun exploring with all the kids).

Speaking of all the kids – I’m not sure what it was, but it really hit home with this visit and seeing all the kids how far we’ve come from freshman year in college. Times do indeed change, but good that friends don’t always do the same!

On our way to start the hike - everyone is accounted for!

Making sure we don't leave anyone behind...

Sophie, Julianne and Maile having fun while Jake plans the route...

We found a bug! And we even touched it too - girls are getting braver 🙂

Lauren was a good little hiker

Maile and Julianne found a little stick hut and had fun playing house...